Little Things
by StupidityNowOffersWisdom
Summary: <html><head></head>In a world where many things are artificial or nonexistent, the real things matter most. Even the little ones. Drabble collection.</html>
1. Coffee

**I  
><strong>**Coffee**  
><em>TatsuyaMiyuki_

The coffee she made, as Tatsuya always insisted, was perfect. An infusion of a sister's wholehearted love was most divine.

Making coffee for Tatsuya has never been a chore. A routine, yes, but never a chore. She found that having to work the kettle in a circular motion helped to calm herself.

* * *

><p>Circles, circles. She thought of all the circles they were caught in - the <em>game<em> Maya had them all play for an heir, the reciprocal reaction their limiting bond had, and the circle of life, even. And her own broken circle - love for Tatsuya that simply could not be returned.

Indeed, he was still able to process emotions when they concerned her, but it never surpassed the parameters of platonic sibling affection. Or so she was told.

_"Love towards his sister, in other words you, and the desire to protect you."_

_Sister, sister, sister._ It was almost as if the term was invented, just for her, just to put Tatsuya behind an unbreakable wall of glass, so far beyond reach, so far… away… Away from her.

Her control slipped, and the coffee cooled rapidly. She took no notice.

_Drip, drip, drip._

It was stupid, really. Why couldn't he have been some other, normal boy who she could have loved without question? Or why couldn't she just suppress those feelings and move on to some other boy, just like those people who date-hopped and changed partners frequently.

Better yet, why couldn't she have ignored everything and fallen for Ichijou Masaki like every other girl? Hell, he'd even fallen _for_ her!

By then, the kitchen and sitting room had cooled to beyond normal temperatures, which prompted Tatsuya to check on her.

She was shaking now, empty kettle thudding clumsily on the kitchen counter.

The coffee had frozen into a block of flavoured ice.

"Miyuki, is there anything wrong?" he asked, pulling her from the counter and onto a chair.

She refused to look at him.

She'd made him worry again, just because she lost control of her emotions and her selfish, selfish desires. And he always had to come in and make sure she was alright - she was wasting precious time of his that could be spent engineering the next magitech breakthrough.

And he was fine with _wasting precious time_. She was his precious little sister, after all.

"Look at me, Miyuki." Again, she did not, and got up to clear the ruined coffee. A quick look at the jar of roast indicated that she'd just wasted the last of their coffee.

"Miyuki-" he started, before getting cut off.

"I apologise for the mess and lack of coffee tonight, onii-sama. I shall take care of it immediately, please don't worry, onii-sama."

She did not meet his eyes. He frowned.

"Miyuki, it's not good to be overstressing yourself. Clearing the dishes is something I can do too. You should rest."

She ignored him, of course, making to empty the drip filter and frozen coffee into the trash.

"Miyuki." It wasn't often when she'd ignored him as such.

"Miyuki. _Miyuki,_" he repeated, pulling her into his arms, smoothing her hair gently.

"Relax. The relic won't cause us any trouble at all," he told her, breath tickling her ear.

He'd missed the point, she realised. But it was good enough that he was holding her the way lovers did in movies and books.

Perhaps the frozen coffee had granted her a boon, of sorts.

* * *

><p><strong>AN:** Well, there we are, a first attempt at anything Mahouka. Of course, one ought to pay their first respects to the fandom by means of some Shibacest, half-arsed, in my case, unfortunately.


	2. Eyes

**II  
><strong>**Eyes  
><strong>_Mikihiko/Mizuki_

_an alternate scenario as to how the two met_

* * *

><p>He sighed, slumping against the wall. He wasn't achieving anything. Training, training - it was hopeless, now.<p>

He hadn't improved at all. The spirits were taking too much time to summon, and he his magic was still crazily unstable - he never knew when he would lose control. Not to mention that it was more tiring than before.

Before that incident.

Sometimes, he wondered, if it was better that he died then and not have to suffer this sort of disgrace from almost losing his magic. It was bad enough that his control suffered so much, he didn't make it into Course One, but, seeing his schoolmates wield magic so freely, constantly improving, always doing their best - the Course Two ones, even...

It hurt, to say the least.

And here he was, back at square one. Back to the days of being in his brother's shadow, back to the days where he once trained with enthusiasm and not purely out of duty.

Perhaps it wasn't meant to be. A taste of heaven where he outshone his brother in terms of magical talent, and a return to reality, where even he had fallen behind his fellow Weeds. It wasn't that he held himself in as high regard as some of those Course One students had, but rather, it was a sort of benchmark, and he hadn't realised that he had set the bar too high.

It didn't really matter, though. He fell short.

* * *

><p>Self-depreciation was far too common among the Course Two students, she realised. The sentiment permeated from nearly every sentence that had to do with 'magic', 'First High' or 'Course One' - this was what she realised in the Literature Club. They were, after all, a non-magical club, and were made up of a majority of Course Two students.<p>

It was a kind of uncomfortable at first, watching her upperclassmen automatically go off about First High's system whenever they happened to be reading works that touched on discrimination and education. The negative aura really did make her uneasy, not to mention that the language used in bashing the system left an odd sour taste in her mouth.

She'd wanted to join the Literature Club to lose herself in prose (and conveniently forget her lack of magical potential), not have upperclassmen rant about it a tad too often. It seemed the culture wasn't quite her cup of tea. It was too late to withdraw, anyway. Her admission into the club would have to last her three years in First High.

Cringing internally as someone fired of another round of expletives at the Course system, she pushed her glasses up and continued to read. She wasn't a prude, really, but she was too gentle to understand the rationale behind cursing.

* * *

><p>She felt it again, that oddly calming pulse of pushions radiating from the unused classroom. Something in her told her she shouldn't enter, and that she'd break whatever nice spell that room had on her if she did. She listened to that.<p>

And so, whenever she was free, she snuck to that corner of the school, basking in the soothing pushion waves. It was strange, really. Catching glimpses of it through the sides of her glasses didn't hurt as much as she had expected it to. Perhaps she was getting better at controlling her sight. Or not.

* * *

><p>Had the spirits not <em>told<em> him that there was someone nearby, he would never have noticed, nor paid heed. He wasn't that much of a person to dabble in others' issues, and had intended to brush it off as someone ditching club activities to nap in the gloomier corners of school.

What had got him interested, however, was the constant detection of this person whenever he showed up at that spot. It was strange, but he ignored it. There were better things for him to do - training.

Pulling out a seal, he started to summon spirits. Water ones, this time. The pushions manifested themselves correctly, but they were not quite as fast as before - too slow, too sluggish, and that meant he was not improving.

Ignoring that one error, he continued with his solitary training, controlling the spirits' movement - that was as crucial as magic invocation speed.

Summoning magic was more versatile than regular magic, as it did not require a CAD to be invoked (charms and the like were used to boost summoning magic as they directed the pushion flow). Its difficulties, however, resided in the fact that it needed good control to be effective - a bit too little, and the spirits would not do as commanded, a bit too much, and the spirits decomposed into raw pushions.

As he repeated the invocation multiple times over, he was starting to exhaust his magical reserves. He could feel himself growing sluggish and the spirits releasing themselves from his control.

The odd thing, though, was that the spirits did not dissipate after he lost control over them. They remained in their pushion form, hovering near the door. Intrigued, he let the spirits linger - it wasn't as if he had the energy to do anything about them, anyway.

Then, one of the pushion blobs slipped through the crack under the door. The other spirits followed, too. Was Ancient Magic supposed to act like that? He did not really know.

Of course, he had to know, and so he dragged himself up from the dusty floor, exited the room, and started to track for traces of the spirits. There was no need, though. The pushion manifestations had conveniently decided to congregate around a student asleep on a windowsill.

* * *

><p>The calming pulse of pushions started to get stronger, as if it were enveloping her in a great magical embrace. Blue orbs of different shades floated around her, like children huddling over a bag of candy.<p>

It was calming, but they started to appear in her vision, the paler orbs flashing brightly, and the darker ones floating in and out of her line of sight, disturbing her little nap.

She woke to find an unfamiliar boy staring oddly at her, body language emitting a strong sense of fatigue. It took her a number of moments to process what was in front of her. A boy, staring at her face - not her chest - with inexplicable interest.

Then, she yelped, falling to the floor haphazardly. Her glasses fell to the side, giving her direct exposure to the pushion waves. The pain came at once - she was grossly unprepared for it - and it was blinding. Her hands instinctively shot to her eyes as she moaned softly, forgetting that only filtered glass could reduce the waves' effects.

The boy panicked, calling and releasing the spirits, hoping that the girl before him would be alright. She was probably an untrained Seeing-type magician and felt extreme pain from the naked eye being exposed to pushion light.

The pain gradually subsided, and she made to push her glasses back into place and stand up. To her surprise, the boy from moments before had not fled, but continued staring at her, with a look of concern on his face.

"I-I'm sorry for the fright!" she squeaked, unsure of what exactly she was supposed to say.

He shook his head. "No, it's my fault - I lost control over the spirits and they left the room like that."

"Is that… is that so…" she murmured, "...they were so pretty, all those shades of blue…"

_...all those shades of blue…_ He took a moment to attempt to refrain from rambling about Crystal Eyes and the like.

Remembering common etiquette, she made haste to introduce herself, blushing shyly as she did so. It was rather..._cute_, he found.

"Um, I'm Shibata Mizuki, class 1F. I-I hope I didn't cause any inconvenience…"

Bowing slightly, he returned the favour. "Yoshida Mikihiko, class 1F. _I'm_ sorry for the inconvenience caused."

Not knowing what to say next, they lapsed into silence, staring awkwardly at each other. Thankfully, he had forgotten to bring up the topic of Crystal Eyes.

Both turned to look away from the other at the same time, blushing madly. It was the first time, for the both of them to have held eye contact with anyone of the opposite gender for such a long period of time.

"Shibata-san," he said, breaking the silence, "you have eyes like crystals."


End file.
